“I think we ought to read only the kind of books
that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with
a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us
happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no
books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could
write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a
disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more
than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone,
like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
— Franz Kafka, letter to Oskar Pollak, 27-January-1904
The first paragraph below is real. The other paragraphs are largely made-up.
Upstairs to the Poety & Beat Literature room. Community Bulletin Board asks questions, customers answer with Post-Its.
Upstairs in the Poetry & Beat Literature room in the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco it was muggy, musty, but calm and infused with history. Beats! I knew little about them other than what could be gleaned from movies and television. I’ve not read any Kerouac and only a little Ginsberg. Gore Vidal in his memoir Palimpsest boasted of buggering Kerouac. Always the buggerer, never the buggeree. I stipulation I now know was common among homosexuals. Then, it seemed an odd and selfish admission from Vidal given his libertine reputation but typically offered few personal details.
Maybe he placed a silver dollar on Kerouac’s back, who, when he caught his breath exclaimed: “I can use this!”
Above the bookshelves, posters ran round the room of poets that listed the year of the photo. Walt Whitman. Edna St. Vincent Millay. Anne Sexton.
A trigger was pulled and I stomped downstairs and yelled at the slight blond young man at the register with an earnest soft meticulous beard. “How can this place have a poster of Anne Sexton and not one of Sylvia Plath?” A pause. My loudness increased. “They’re both American. I revere Anne Sexton. She’s a personal favorite and I talk with her in dreams. But Plath is the better, stronger poet. What are the standards here? Is Plath thought of as too precious? Too much the purview of cloistered Women’s Studies departments and sensitive teenage souls to be brought out for display? Break Plath free!” I stumbled over my tongue on the last sentence and repeated is more slowly and loudly. “Break Plath free! Bring her to the Pantheon upstairs! Set her among the stars!”
I blacked out. Then I came to. I was still in the City Lights Bookstore, seated at a corner table, my head resting against a bookshelf. A paper cup of water was in front of me and I sipped from it. My courier bag was set at my feet. I dragged the main zipper open to extract my large Moleskine journal. I fetched a pen, and opened my journal to see a series of blue and red marks and edits across the 30 or so pages I had already written up.
Violated, I looked closely and found myself agreeing with almost all the suggestions. I made faces at the excess of added commas. I am a devotee of the Oxford comma, but loathe when commas are added to indicate a pause as if in a speech. Not necessary. Ruins the flow.
I took myself, the cup of water, my bag, my pen, and my emended journal and exited the bookstore, placing a dollar in the tip jar for art, shame, and karma.
I hate the grim calculations and budgeting that comes with an ailing pet – slim and expensive chances to maintain that pet’s health but that may also increase its distress to no benefit. I hate, once euthanasia is done, how it changes the rhythms and routines of the home, even if it means less clean-up. I hate knowing if I killed my own meat for food I’d still be sad at times like these, but more pragmatic.
Due to her bladder cancer, diminishing energy, and messy external symptoms – I euthanized our dog of 14 and a half years this afternoon. I got her a cheeseburger for lunch today (Burgerville), because, fuck it.
Who goes with Argus?
You are now a fuzzy hide over meat. You used to be a wheezing farting bag Of love and company and eating and shame And delight. Now inert. No, gone. You are only in our memories. We are no longer in yours.
A meter tracking bike traffic on the Hawthorne Bridge in Portland. Like London Bridge in The Wasteland : “so many/I had not thought death had undone so many.” but happier.
Images crawl up Then are broadcast For us to see Into your past When you were young.
Poses struck while A camera clicked. Days passed outside Past what was snapped When you were young.
The snaps resurface Years later with “Remember?” “Place?” Sentimental whiffs When you were young.
Others of us Bear witness though Not witnesses Then, piqued to view When you were young.
Ripeness, smoothness And smiles thrown hard. Warding distress Like priest or bard When you were young.
How, who was she. Outstretch fingers. If the same age, Did they linger When you were young.
You are hiding Molting beauty Sun skin honeying. You were not you When you were young.
I now hear you, “I remember” Sighed to be kind. Arid nod back to When you were young.
Dimmer souls swarm And cling on you. I’d want to warm But not love you When you were young.
I get stuck on Your life from then To now and when You became you from When you were young.
Did it turn when Your edge cut through. Someone heard when You spoke your truth When you were young.
The friends in stasis Are the same but Slower. Their paths Clear, even back to When you were young.
Fact and will changes Every molecule Of you. Estranging Yourself more from When you were young.
For months your book of poems sat atop all the other books on my nightstand. I would read a poem, or two, or three And re-read them once, or twice. And dream of you and me. We would sit. You had no Minerva wisdom, Manifesting a shimmering catalog model now leading a life of thought.
We would talk. And act. And each morning I would wake And approve and wonder why you had visited.
As I have now come to the end of your work, the book set down To be shelved soon, I realized why you never had advice. You were not a sage. You set the pen down and let the car run And exhale its happily fine particled gas and smoke to fill Your lungs more gently than the acrid burn of cigarette ash. Little more warm smog than on a busy intersection and not moving. The hum of activity making your garage both busy and alone. You thought of your beautiful friend’s undercalculated death. Cassandra’s last cry not meant as a final cry. But she famously made a man’s cheek trickle blood. You thought of her and wanted to go. Ten years on, the world drawn small And unyielding and nothing shown for enduring it. You knew you’d be a nuisance for those who found you. But you wanted to go.
I close your book and my heart aches, but the world grows. What we shared is the sigh of smarts to drown out our wants. We heaved measured words and smiled and threw darts From our desk chairs or living rooms with our feet up on ottomans And won. We pinned down for a time the things that We saw approach. A victory of sight and talking over the whispering loam that sustains our homes Until the brittle frames snap or rot from tremors or time or newer houses And the earth that oozed us up sops us back in.
Your mind and wants and moans are on paper on my nightstand. A cat has knocked that book to the floor many times. You would have laughed each time. That same cat now lays and warms my back as I write this, My stomach on my bed, In my bedroom over the garage. As I shift its front claws stick to the back of my shirt.
With a need for something I slide the drawer open. Metal and plastic and metal tools clatter. How many years since I used some of these?
When children inherit cluttered drawers do they scavenge and consider “What is this?” “A melon baller.” their sibling or spouse or partner will answer. And that will be it. Tossed back with a clatter.
Will they recall that I hated canteloupe? Will the melon baller find its way to their home? Will they neglect it as I did? Will they manufacture a false memory of me scooping melon shavings into juicy cold globes? Will they donate it? “Why did our parents have three pair of scissors in this drawer?”
A sample from my writing project. A main character contemplates an uhappily deposed ruler being reincarnated. As a non sequitur, including a screenshot of accounts recommended as “Similar to God” by Twitter (“God” is a Twitter account I follow):
Some of his greatness could become part of a squirrel or wolf, who for some minute reason would be the mightiest and most ambitious of its group. Commanding respect. He would find that novelty and form of reward more gratifying than the restoration of wearisome familiarity held by again holding dominion over all who beheld him. A piece of him would be content in its element, satisfied with a day’s achievement having strived for only things within its grasp. A felled deer for the pack. A stash of tree nuts and acquisition. Maintenance and cooperation with a mate. Even if the day was not perfect, the next held promise for sufficient status and shelter and nourishment. He would feel full and not lost, not like a log with its center rotted out and coated with a sap always on fire with no remedy for the crackling and burning that he took with him everywhere.
So, yes, posting about Anne Sexton again. Saw this on Facebook and was amused by Anne Sexton’s reverie on camera about music:
Where are the t.v. shows capturing artist rapt in enthusiasmos instead of stars stumbling in and out of buildings and cars?
While typing up purple prose from my hand-written manuscript (Dirty parts, yay! Also: yikes and ugh!) I came across this quote from Anne Sexton I jotted down from a podcast in June 2012 (where I was in my manuscript). The quote is over-the-top. Most anyone can think of good poetry that isn’t extruded from the writer’s marrow. But then I saw this photo and laughed and decided to put it all together. Don’t know what the deal is with the dress, but fair guess it was funny. Check the cigarette cherry!
Dress in saturated sage, magenta violet canary seafoam circles. Lithe tan limbs. Strong smile, kind voice, sly grin worth knowing. Unpracticed poise from presence in the moment. Dirt is not dirty, it is loam, soil, potential. Plonger la main au plus profond d’un sac de grains.
Les poules couvent souvent au couvent. Take in your senses, children, slow things to remember them. Things you know in this time of life are growing all around you, take it in. Things will not always be growing, growth will slow all around you. Things you know will decay, more things, as you grow. Draw out the time and the life and the colors and the tastes as you can. Train yourself to observe, discover new measurements, new standards.
Alors, quand le moment vient, il faut sauter la barrière sans hésiter. Do not fear the quiet, impose it during a flurry, use it. Return to it. The quiet space may be empty, but empty is not hollow. Les temps sont durs pour les rêveurs. You can train yourself, in every place, to listen, see, taste, breathe. Remember in the stark times to laugh at the cold. That is your breath, your will. They are for you.
On a whim in late summer, I hung out in a hospital cafeteria to try writing there. It was very productive. I’ve gone back two more times and had similarly good spells.
Snacks and drinks abound, but a sense of mortality suffuses the environment. Science as our only true bulwark against amoral nature. And it feels good to be in a hospital out of whim instead of necessity or vigil.
